My wife and I decided a few months ago that our next trip out west would include a return trip to California.  However, we decided that we would skip a return visit to Los Angeles, San Diego or San Francisco and focus instead on the Central California coast.  We flew into San Francisco, rented a car and headed south toward our first destination, the Monterey Bay area. 

After a quick late lunch at an In-N-Out Burger in Mountain View we headed out toward Santa Cruz, one of my wife's childhood homes.  Santa Cruz's beach area looked like it hasn't changed much since the 1960s.  It was almost like driving through a movie set of a time long since past. 

We continued driving around Monterey Bay to our first destination, the City of Monterey and the immediate area, including Pacific Grove, Pebble Beach, Carmel-by-the-Sea and Seaside.  Monterey is a charming small city with a rich cultural history.  We walked all along the bay including the area known as Cannery Row.  Immigrant Chinese fisherman lived adjacent to and fished the bay in the 1850s.  Sicilian immigrants began fishing for sardines in the bay in the early 1900s.  Japanese and other investors began building canneries to process, pack and ship sardines shortly thereafter.  Japanese, Filipino and Spanish immigrants came to the area to work in the canneries.  Working in a fish processing plant in that era was not a very pleasant experience.  How bad could the economies be in their home countries?  The diverse group of people living and working in Monterey were focused on one thing, building the sardine canning business as rapidly as possible and making a lot of money doing it.  New technology was developed to permit the most efficient and fastest sardine processing possible in that era.

Around 1930 the local "environment expert" told the industry that they were over fishing sardines and they would deplete the resource.  The business people kept growing the business.  By 1948 the industry collapsed because the sardines had essentially been depleted.  The amount of sardines remaining were a small fraction of the peak production of a few years earlier.  Without sardines to pack the local industry disintegrated and all that was left were useless industrial buildings. 

There are just a few original cannery buildings left on Cannery Row today.  Those that remain have been re-purposed.  Cannery Row is now a very nice tourist attraction.  John Steinbeck's novel, Cannery Row, was published in 1945.  He lived in the area and based some of his characters on local people.  

Today, the area around Fisherman's Wharf hosts events like the Clam Chowder and Calamari Festival.  As we walked along the harbor we saw harbor seals basking in the sun on the rocks near the shore and watched sea lions making lots of noise as they claimed their turf under the docks.

Time has marched on and the past is the past, the present is now and the future is what we will determine.  There is a lot to learn about how people, cities, and industries evolve.  How do we make as many good decisions as possible so we can make the future the best it can be?  And how does one define "best" and what time horizon are we talking about?  Monterey has its story and many other places have their own.

What is a good decision on an issue that impacts many people and the environment in which we live?

After visiting the Monterey area we started driving south on the Pacific Coast Highway so we could see one of the most beautiful areas of the US, the Central California coastline.  I hope to write about that part of our trip soon.

TPM

I have posted my article on David Stockman's new book, The Great Deformation - The Corruption of Capitalism in America, http://www.thepurplemuse.com/id56.html. This is a tough book to read and accept in many respects.  The book is over 700 pages long and contains a truthful analysis of our nations leaders for the past 100 years.  As many of us know sometimes the truth hurts.  Mr. Stockman presents in a great detail the path we have taken to create the government dominated crony capitalism dominated, warfare and welfare state that our country has become.  The book is not a pleasant read for those that care about our nations economic, fiscal and monetary health.

The time has come for fundamental change.  Are we strong enough as a nation to absorb the pain the changes will create?  Will enough Americans make a determined effort to remove from power and influence those that are in the process of destroying our nation?  We will find out the answer to that question in months and years ahead.

TPM

P.S. I added some additional material to my article since I first published it.

This morning I was watching Congressman Steny Hoyer being interviewed on CNBC's Squawk Box morning show.  Hoyer made the comment that the US is "the richest nation on earth" during a discussion on economic issues.  How many times have we heard politicians make that statement?  I think we would all answer that we have heard this many times over many years.  My question is "Do you believe this statement is true?"

What makes a person, family, company, organization, government or nation rich?  Many people look at things that are visible from the outside.  If someone lives in a big expensive house, drives exotic new cars and buys the latest and greatest stuff all the time most people would judge that the person must be very rich to afford their level of consumption.  If one applies the same perspective more broadly and looks at many areas of the US, we could make an assessment that the US looks like the richest nation on earth.  Or should we have a different perspective?

If the person with the expensive house, new cars and great stuff paid cash for all the things they bought, has a substantial amount money in the bank or invested and has a job or owns a business that generates a high income, it is likely they are truly rich.  But if the person borrowed the money to pay for all the stuff, doesn't have much money in the bank and is barely paying their bills every month, is that person rich or merely creating an image of wealth when in truth their net worth is very low or perhaps negative.  I would make the case that creating an image of wealth doesn't make anyone really rich.

When I look at the US I see a nation that used to be rich and has an image of wealth but is no longer rich.  Any nation that has a total debt (consumer, business, governments) to gross domestic product ratio as high as ours is not really rich.  We have succeeded in creating a façade of wealth.  Over the years the US has consumed much of its wealth through war expenditures, excess consumer consumption and non-productive government expenditures.  The US has lost much of its manufacturing industry that generated a great deal of its national income.  If one looks only at the visible aspects of our nation we still look pretty good, but the numbers don't lie, there is a mountain of debt and government unfunded liabilities that is growing much faster than the national income as measured by the growth in gross domestic product.

One of the reasons why the US retains an image of being wealthy is that the US continues to provide opportunities for individuals and companies to become very wealthy.  The US has created numerous billionaires concurrently with tens of millions of people living in poverty or dealing with a significantly reduced standard of living.  In what other country can an individual company like Apple be so successful that it has more cash in the bank than the US government?

The US is consuming its wealth on a net basis, not creating it.  When tens of millions of its citizens are on federal government issued food stamps that are being funded through deficit spending this is not the sign of a country that is rich or building wealth.

Politicians like Hoyer need to stop making statements like the US is the richest nation on earth and start talking honestly to the people about where we stand as a nation.  We need a massive restructuring of government policies and programs to reverse the current trends.  The US has capability to rebuild its wealth but it will take a lot of very hard work to make it happen.

 

TPM

I was reading and listening to some CDs of my favorite band, the Doobie Brothers, this afternoon when I realized that my web site needed a theme song and video.  What better song and appropriate title is World Gone Crazy, the title track of the Doobie's 2011 album of the same name.  There is no doubt that our world gets crazier every day.  Take a few minutes and watch and listen to the Doobie Brothers' World Gone Crazy.

TPM